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Wednesday, October 31, 2012

"This is Halloween" Nail Art Challenge: Recreate

Hello again! Happy Halloween!!! One of my favorite holidays! It's so much fun!

Indoors, artificial light, with flash.

Today's prompt is "Recreate your favourite from another challenger"! I was blown away by Shannon's (from Somewhere Over the Polish Rainbow) gradient manicure from October 22nd. I knew once I saw this one that I had to try it.

This was really not easy!! My goodness! Two attempts later this is what I came up with:

Indoors, artificial light, no flash.

I started with a base of Zoya Arizona. Once that was dry, I used the narrow part of make-up wedge to blot on the red using OPI Got the Blues for Red leaving a center stripe of orange visible. I then did the same on the outer edges with Zoya Mimi. I went over this a few times, trying to blend the colors evenly. This part was the most challenging--I think because the colors were so different from one another that any mistake would show. I had purple in my orange, the red was really saturated and tried to take over the whole nail! In the end, I had to carefully paint the center stripe over with Arizona to cover my boo-boos. I slathered on some Seche Vite to dry all that polish and waited.

Once I deemed it dry enough, I used the end of a bobby pin to make the dots. I used China Glaze Riveting, Orly Star Spangled, and Orly Velvet Rope for the dots. Once the dots were in place, it really completed the overall look and hide some of my sloppy sponging. Another coat of Seche Vite, and I was quite happy with this attempt.

These look like jewels! The colors are gorgeous. Thanks for the inspiration, Shannon! Stellar job!

Thanks! Yes, it was a pain! I was fairly confident at first since I've been having great success with the normal two-color, horizontal gradients, but this was much more difficult. I couldn't actually use the same technique for this as I do normally, hence the narrow edge of the make-up sponge.

It was well worth it, though, very pretty. I would have never thought to use these colors together--thanks for the idea! ^_^